One of my projects in the past six months was to launch a food and wine magazine online, with the help of the good folks at Bacchus Selections. The design of the site was key, in that I wanted a robust framework that would not take a hoard of IT guys to maintain. That meant WordPress. However, I didn't want the typical blog style visuals.
I wanted the viewer to be given the option to browse visually without the need to scroll in the hierarchy. I wanted a clean and crisp appearance that was more modern than anything else in the wine trade. There are too many photos of draping grape vines on wine blogs for my taste.
The final design for the magazine was a series of full color "labels" that could be customized easily depending on what the article was able. The text is modern and clean, with a dusty black background. You can check it out here. Getting simplicity like this wasn't easy, but it allows the reader to browse and explore content in a way that most online magazines do not allow. It also translates very well to the screens of internet phones and tablets.
In some places, we did keep a more traditional approach. Those were mostly in one-off pages and posts in which we could promote our "Top 10 Wines for Summer" or our "Ten Favorite Belgian Beers for a Picnic" or whatever else we were interested in writing about. These were mostly designed for folks coming in from Stumbleupon or a search who were not yet avid readers. Sometimes you need a bit of sticky candy to draw in the eyes.
The drawback of a radical site design, especially in a conservative niche like wine and wine reviews, is that some people may simply click off the site without even giving it a chance. That is a serious issue, since bounce rates can damage the site's position in the SERPS. However, we felt that the interactivity of the site would counterbalance those issues.
